Differences Between Marketo's Lead Creation Date Fields

ByIdan Carmeli

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06 Jul, 2016

•

Marketo employs three different fields related to any given record's creation date. This post describes the differences between them.

Created At

The date value in this field marks the first day a person has been tagged with a Marketo cookie by making a visit to the company's website. It can be filled that one time only. From that moment on, any subsequent visit made by the same person using the same browser & cookie, will be marked as an activity on that record's activity log, yet they may either remain anonymous in perpetuity, or until the day they become known.

Note: earlier this year, Marketo has deprecated the ability to use the 'Is Anonymous' filter and select unknown records from the database.

Lead was Created

The date value in this field marks the first day that a lead has been created, or has become known, in the database. This could be the result of that person filling out a form on the web, having been added via a list import, or through an API call, or via a sync action from the connected CRM. As of that moment, it
is considered to be a Lead in the system. This field, just like the “Created At” field, can be filled once only.

SFDC Created Date

As its name implies, the value in this field marks the first date when a record has been created in Salesforce, regardless of its source.

Example
:

Today is 07/04/2016. A person visits the webpage of Converto
, reads some material, moving
from one page to another, and downloading some reading material. In the
meantime, since the person is not known in the system, all the information
about the person is being saved anonymously, as it is being tracked
by a cookie that was set in the person’s computer(similarly to the way their visits are tracked by Google Analytics). The person is now saved in
Marketo, having ID and activity log, and the “Created At” field, filled with
07/04/2016.

A day later, the same person visits the same webpage and
fills out a form. Once that happens, the credentials of that person are being
linked to that ID that was given a day before. Now, the person has and ID,
credentials, and “Lead was Created” field, filled with 07/05/2016.

Let's say that at Converto we don't sync the lead directly to our CRM, but instead, good B2B marketers as we are, we nurture new leads until they've provided the required signals telling us they're 'hot' enough to talk to a sales person. Let's also say this happened two weeks later. So at that point the field "SFDC Created Date" is populated with the date 07/19/2016.

Update: RevEngineInsider just published a great post
with important tips that help overcome some of the non-obvious shortcomings of the Lead Was Created filter.

Marketo has been communicating this architectural change to its customers worldwide since August of 2016, yet only lately it has become clearer that the change will affect more than a few fields. Specifically this is true for Marketo customers whose Salesforce CRM edition is the Professional edition.

Tip: if you're unsure which edition your Salesforce org is running on, log in to your account there and simply hover the cursor on the browser tab where Salesforce loaded. The tab tooltip will show you the edition.

If you're not a Salesforce Pro user, you can stop reading here; the change won't affect you beyond the 16 fields that you were asked by Marketo to recreate in Salesforce (see here
, Marketo login required).

It's hard to overstate the degree to which Marketo's Email Editor 2.0 has improved on the previous generation. In fact, it has become, in one fell swoop, the most powerful email editor in the marketing automation space - and we know quite a few of them very well.

One of its most striking features is the use of variables to expose many aspects of email design and functionality to the editor's user interface, enabling users to quickly and easily manipulate their email's elements, without resorting to source code edits or fighting the whims of the rich text editor.

To fully benefit from this feature, though, it's important to understand the two types of variables available to you: global and local. Mastering them and configuring your templates accordingly can greatly improve your (or your users') email editing experience in Marketo.

One of the key functions of any marketing operations role, or system, is to ensure the proper handling of new leads. Depending on your business process implementation, this may involve any combination of the following sub-procedures: